Small carrots

This week I dug up a few of my garden’s carrots. I’m going to leave most of the crop in the ground over the winter, covered with a mulch of leaves to protect them from hard frost, harvesting them as needed (they taste so much better, fresher and more “carroty” when freshly dug.) As I dug I noticed how…pathetic they were: mostly tiny, those with any diameter were short and stubby, just an awful crop all around. I began to berate my gardening abilities; the location of the garden; the hard compact soil, heavy with clay – the worst medium for carrots; the lousy summer we’d had…

And then I remembered. I remembered what I was going through in the spring, when the garden was getting started – the chemo, the radiation, surgery, nausea, fatigue. Duh. Gee, so you didn’t prepare the soil with nutrient-rich compost and well-rotted manure or balance it with several large bucket-fulls of carrot-friendly river sand, like you usually do…you didn’t get the soil deeply tilled with your roto-tiller, as is needed for carrots…you weren’t out there thinning the baby carrots as they came up to allow for maximum growth…

Well, my first response to this epiphany was to go a little easier on myself (and my garden/soil/the summer weather – no, scratch that last one – it was a terrible summer…) I should be pleased, as I am, that anything was planted at all. And that something grew, however pathetic.

And, it brought back just how lousy I felt during those months. My, it was a time. I really don’t want to think about ever having to go through it again.

But, it also gave me reasons to be thankful. Those days are gone, they’re past. I read in Isaiah this morning: “Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past” (43:18) Good advice.

I’m also grateful for the gift of good neighbours and friends. For my neighbour, Brad, who, later in the planting season, rototilled the remainder of the garden, and for others who helped out with other gardening chores (and many, many other things…)

So there is value in reflecting on the past, even if that just expresses itself in gratitude that we don’t have to relive certain experiences.

Maybe that’s the right place to leave an (unintended) pre-Remembrance Day reflection.

Isaiah goes on to give the reason why we don’t have to dwell on the past “See, I am doing a new thing… I am making a way in the desert, a stream in the wasteland.” The Messiah that he points to is the One, along with all of you, whose powerful friendship has got me through these months and has provided “a way” and refreshment.

And those carrots that did make it, those puny, stubby survivors…? They taste fantastic.

Love and blessings, Graeme